Brilliant Thinking

Search engines are a complex beast, but the main guidance is to have good content, well written with key words that you anticipate people to be searching on well placed in said content. Plus, search engines can take several months to fully index and “understand” new websites. The lag is due to people abusing how search engines work, so it is believed that they put websites “on hold” (sandbox) for a period of time to make sure they are legitimate.

There are numerous factors that affect ranking in search engines, and we find this page helpful:

    http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php

It gets quite technical and full of jargon, but does highlight the top ten factors affecting search engine ranking positions (SERPS) out of 5:

1. Title Tag - 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document - 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming - 3.69

Aside from the content angle (and ensuring that the key phrases you expect to be used are present enough, but not too much - this constitutes keyword spamming and counts against you), one other significant factor is linking - both in to your site from other websites and out from your site to other websites. The goal here is to get other sites that are related to your business area to link to you - this suggests to the search engine that you are like those sites and that those sites think your content is good, so search engines should think your content is good too (a sort of “who you know” model in cyberspace). Remember that you need a few links out as your site needs to be seen as a good “networker”.